Comparing The Beatles before and after breakup
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Introduction
What is my Corpus?
The breakup of The Beatles was one of the most impactful events in music history, but after all the success they had in the 60’s it paved the way for all the individual members to pursuit a solo career. They each had varying levels of success, but all produced some big hits. My Corpus consists of all music from The Beatles and their (former) members from th 1963 all the way until 1993. During this course I hope to investigate how each Beatles member evolved their music styles after the breakup, and how that style compares to the music they made when they were still together.
Why did I choose this topic?
I choose this corpus as The Beatles is maybe the most successful band of all time, while still being relatively popular today. Although the individual members never got the same success, they were still very popular which means the success of The Beatles can not by attributed to one individual member. I thought this would be an interesting research topic as one of the main reasons for the breakup was a disagreement in musical direction and songwriting. By looking at the difference after the breakup we can determine if the disagreements indeed led to noticeable differences in their respective music production post-breakup. I expect the music from Paul McCartney and John Lennon the differ the least, as they did most of the songwriting in The Beatles. George Harrison was influenced by Indian classical music, that is why I expect him the deviate the most from The Beatles music.
General Info
Typical/Atypical Tracks and Further Info
Some atypical tracks include “Helter Skelter” by The Beatles, which is sometimes considered the first Heavy Metal song, “Temporary Secretary” by Paul McCartney featuring unique electronic sounds and “No Time Or Space”, which is a 25 minute song instrumental song by George Harrison.
There are some albums not included because they are not available on Spotify. This especial affects the amount of Ringo Starr songs in this Corpus, but he is still represented by 7 albums. I’ve excluded albums after 1993 and live albums as it is hard to make a meaningful comparison with songs from these albums.
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Corpus
Timeline of Development
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Positivity trougout the years
In the plot on the right you can see the mean valence of every album released by The Beatles or one of their members up till 1963. The size of the dots correspond to the amount of songs on that album. What is interesting about this plot is that the valence decreased following almost all albums released by The Beatles. This is not surprising as their earlier repertoire consisted mostly of simple love songs, but became more and more serious and experimental as the band developed.
From all the former members Ringo Starr had the most uplifting songs on average, but the most positive album, excluding The Beatles, is the John Lennon album “Rock’N’Roll”.
Loudness
Although globally their has been a general trend towards more loud music, The Beatles have since their breakup not increased the loudness significantly. Ringo Starr has again the least loud albums on average, however his last album in this corpus is also the loudest of them all. This is the album “Time Takes Time” released in 1992.
the two albums by George Harrison around 1970 are two instrumental albums, which were largely influenced by classical indian music. These were both released in the time that The Beatles were still together.
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Chart 1: Valence
Chart 2: Loudness
Key
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Here you can see which proportion of each band uses each key. George Harrison seems to make more use of the B major and F# major keys relative to the other band members. Paul McCartney has a pretty even relative distribution over all keys, while Ring Starr makes great use of A# major and G# major.
below if included the chordogram of two songs written by John Lennon. One is his most successful song of his solo career, “Imagine”, which is a soft, hopeful song. The other is his most successful song written during his time at The Beatles, “Come Together”. This song is a protest song against the Vietnam war.
The song “Imagine” is in the C key according to the Spotify API. This seems to correspond with the chordogram, as the most common cords seem to be C major, E minor, G major and F major. It looks like there is also some spillover into C minor and F minor.
The chordogram for “Come together” looks a lot more chaotic. According to Spotify it is the A key. For this song it is harder to pinpoint the common chords. Although D minor and D major look most frequent. This would seem a bit weird in combination with the A key, but there could again be some spillover. After the 200 second mark there or no real matches for the cords. This part of the chordogram corresponds to a part in the song consisting mostly of drums.
Key Mode
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Chordogram 1: Imagine
Chordogram 2: Come Together
Chromagram
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On this page i’ve included the chromagram of two more unusual songs. One written by John Lennon during his time at the Beatles: “I Am The Walrus”. This song is full of nonsensical lyrics.
The second is by Paul McCartney when he was part of Wings. “Band on The Run” is one of the more popular songs by Paul McCartney after the breakup. Because most members had left the band by the time of recording this song, Paul played bass, drums and most of the guitar parts.
The chromagram of “I Am The Walrus”, is a bit all over the place. The most common pitch seems to be A, but there is little structure to the pitches.
The chromagram of “Band On the Run” has a lot more structure to it. Especially in the beginning when the G and D pitch are most dominant. it is this intro with less intruments involved that the different pitches are the clearest.
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Chromagram 1: I Am The Walrus
Chromagram 2: Band On The Run
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I Am The Walrus
Band On The Run
Chroma Matrices
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On the right are the self-similarity matrices of the pitches of two songs written by George Harrison. Both are calmer, well structured songs, which makes them interesting to compare. “Here Comes The Sun” is the Beatles song with the most streams on spotify. “My Sweet Lord” is Harrison’s most popular song from his solo career.
In “Here Comes The Sun” their are some short repetitions going on up until 90 seconds in. After that comes a short part repeating many times over, supported by the lyrics: “Sun, sun, sun, here it comes”. The yellow cross that can be seen around 130 seconds is an instrumental part on the guitar.
“My Sweet lord” has a very different structure, with the song being separated in two distinct blocks. The first block being an extended introduction and the second block following a subtle shift in key from E major to F# major (my corpus contains two versions of this song, according to Spotify one is in the F# key and one in C#). It is hard to determine what the cross pattern in the matrix corresponds with.
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Self-Similarity Matrix 1: Here Comes The Sun
Self-Similarity Matrix 2: My Sweet Lord
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Here Comes The Sun
My Sweet Lord
Tempo
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Tempograms
On this page I’ve included two songs written by Paul McCartney, one at his time at the Wings and one at The Beatles. The first one is “Live And Let Die”, one of the most iconic songs from his solo career. This song has four tempo changes, although Spotify seems to struggle with picking up the tempo at the start and end of the song. The tempo moves around between about 120 BPM and 150 BPM. After 50 seconds the song picks up pace really fast with an part that is played by an orchestra supported by heavy drums. After 2 minutes it moves back to calmer vocals. After this the orchestra repeats again.
The second song is “Martha My Dear”, a song from The White Album. This song has a more constant tempo, however there seems to be a small change in tempo around the 40 second mark. Throughout the song it stays at 90 BPM, but Spotify also picks up something around the 130 BPM. This song has some tempo changes on a smaller scale, too small to be noticeable on the tempogram.
Boxplot
Below added a boxplot for all members and the median tempo of their songs. George Harrison has a really strong preference for a tempo around 120 BPM, while John Lennon likes to experiment more. I expected The Beatles to have a broader distribution of tempi as different people wrote the songs, but they do have a few outliers. These are the songs “Baby’s In Black” and “Only A Northern Song”.
Tempo Boxplot
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Tempogram: Live And Let Die
Tempogram: Martha My Dear
Dendrogram & Heatmap
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Dendrogram
Heatmap
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On the left you can see a dendrogram of the 5 most popular songs from The Beatles, john Lennon and Paul McCartney. I’ve made this plot to hopefully see a correlation between the songs written by either artist in their time in the Beatles and their solo career. in this dendrogram we can see three main groups. the group on the left consists of four Paul McCartney songs and one Beatles song. The middle one contains tree Lennon songs and two Beatles songs, and the one on the right has two Beatles and Lennon songs and one McCartney song. The dendrogram seems to have made two groups with music lying very close to either artist and one with a mix of the rest, which seems to have less interconnections than the other two. For this dendrogram the average cluster method was used.
The heatmap of the dendrogram shows how important each factor is when determining the clustering of the songs. From this plot we can see some interesting things, for example the instrumentalness of most songs seem to be pretty homogeneous except for three songs at the top that are all grouped together. We can thus conclude that instrumentalness probably played a big role in grouping these songs together.
Conclusion
Conclusion
From the first visualizations showing the loudness and valence throughout the years, we can see that The Beatles started writing more serious songs and the individual members largely hold on the level they reached at the end of their career together. After the breakup the members where more free to experiment and deviate more often from the mean as can be seen in the boxplot about tempo. Although as can be seen from the clustering they do retain their individual sounds. This is also something that recurs when looking at the songs that George Harrison wrote in his solo career and in the Beatles, with both songs compared with chroma-matrices being well structured songs.
It is harder to determine how George Harrison and particularly Ringo Starr compare between their solo and Beatles career, as they were less involved in the writing process than Lennon and McCartney. Also the unfortunate death of Lennon in 1980 makes it harder to draw meaningful comparisons later on.